"Unreason is less than reason, reason is less than law, authority is greater than law, but heaven is supreme" Tokugawa saying

I think almost every foreigner (at least those from western countries) that has lived in Japan long enough would agree with me on one thing: whether inside trains, on the street, at restaurants or in the workplace, you will always have the sensation of being watched. At my job is common to hear people telling each other “hey, your lunch looks really good!”, even though they are seated far away from where the person eating lunch is. Whenever I go the supermarket, people walking in the aisles will ALWAYS look at the things I’ve bought before looking at my face. I thought at first this was a thing happening only to foreigners living here, but I later noticed this is common behavior to most Japanese. I’m not saying that prying into other people’s lives is something exclusive to this country (far from it), it’s just that for a long time I totally ignored just how important this behavior is in the culture of this country. Let me explain…

One of the most important systems for social control around the world has always been religion. In the specific case of Abrahamic religions, the belief in a superior being that “loves us” and that at the same time is watching our every move and threatens to send us to hell if we don’t behave as he commands, has kept most of the western world on check for hundreds of years. On the other side of the world (where Christianization (read: “conquer”) wasn’t too effective, the elites have used several strategies to keep people controlled. In the case of Japan, there was an interesting mix of religion and brute force that can be felt even now.

The Edo period (1603-1868) was one of relative calm, after the constant battles of the many bands of warriors attempting to bring the whole archipelago under their rule. Peace during this period could be kept mostly to the brutal control of the Tokugawa clan. Among the systems introduced by this family, the “sankin kotai” is perhaps the most well known, as well as the caste system, usefully copied from the Chinese confucianist system.

Maybe the system that affected the life of Japanese peasants (more than 80% of the population) the most was the one known as “mura-hachibu” (村八分) . This term is formed from the words mura ,meaning “village” and hachibu, meaning “eight parts”. These eight parts referred to village activities any person would be excluded from, if he or she was caught doing something “wrong”. The activities were: 1) marriages (kekkon-shiki), ceremonies for the construction of a new house (shinchiku-iwai), 3) coming-of-age ceremonies (seijin-shiki), religious events (houji), 5) births (akachan no tanjou), 6) rebuilding works after floods (kouzui no shori), 7) nursing of sick people (kanbyou), and 8) travel (ryokou).

The only two events left in which these ostracized people could join were 9) extinguishing fires (shouka) and 10) preparation of dead bodies for funerals (soushiki no sewa). As you can see these last two events were precisely those no one would normally want to do.

You could be asking yourself now, why were those people being treated in that way?

Japanese villages were mostly self-administered during that time. The shogun didn’t actually care much about what happened there, as long as each village paid their corresponding rice tax and weren’t looking to alter the status quo. When the shogun intervened, punishments were generally brutal (people found “guilty” of any crime were commonly boiled, burned, crucified, decapitated or cut in two). In some cases not only the individual, but also their families and even the whole village were punished! From this we can understand why a whole village would try to ostracize and isolate an individual. They were only trying to save their own skin!

Villages then designed a very efficient system of control, in where everybody will watch each other constantly to avoid someone would do something considered “wrong” and become subjects of collective punishment. Each village would have a group of people called goningumi (group of five), which would report to the local daimyo. Moreover, the shogunate had a group of spies called metsuke, whose work was basically to snoop around the villages and report about the activities of their people and leaders. If someone committed a crime and it could be proven that the people around knew about it or tried to cover it, punishment was imminent.

A common person could not simply pack his stuff and go to a different place. Laws indicated that anyone who wanted to move to another village would need a document called okurijou. Without this document no one could enter any village other than their own. The reasoning behind this measure was simply because if anyone decided to leave and move to a different place, there would be less people to work the fields and harvest the rice needed for taxes, causing troubles to the whole village and to the local daimyo as well. Each village had a detailed registry of the number of people, their legal status and religious affiliation (very much like the present-day koseki system).

After reading this, I think the reader can understand two things. The first is why the Japanese unconsciously try so hard to know what people around them is doing, and the other is how the ruling elite that has been in charge of the country for a long time (yes, even nowadays), actually don’t care about the well-being of their people, but theirs only, and that they have no trouble getting rid of anyone in order to keep the ideal of “chouwa” (harmony).

What do you think? Do you feel like someone is watching you all the time, or maybe you are the one enjoying being nosey?